La Correspondencia de Pierre Bayle, filosofo del siglo XVII

Abstract

How did the database project begin? The Correspondance de Pierre Bayle is a publication produced from the electronic work entitled Le Monde de la correspondance Bayle, devised in 1999 and since developed by our team with the help of the Arcane software program in accordance with the operating instrumental paradigm “Le monde selon Arcane” (addressed more fully below). The Arcane project was launched in the early 1990s at the CNRS Centre of Eighteenth-Century Studies, a Humanities and Social Science laboratory in Montpellier. How was the corpus defined? The corpus of the active and passive correspondence of Bayle (Labrousse & McKenna 1999-20171) consists of some 10,000 manuscript pages, housed for the most part among major libraries (Paris, London, New York, Leyde). Our point of departure was the collection of more than 1,800 letters, a critical inventory of this data (set up by Elisabeth Labrousse), the transcription of the texts, the translation of Latin and Italian letters, and finally the creation of a databank of digital images. These images accompany the annotated edition of the letters’ content on the Bayle correspondence website. The correspondence’s metadata is copyright-exempt and has been integrated into the EMLO database at Oxford. The online edition currently (as of February 2017) consists of 1,099 letters. The entire correspondence will be freely available to the public in 2022. It is also integrated into the corpus of Lumieres electroniques (Electronic Enlightenm